Assignment 2: Card 3

Research and Thumbnails

We love to organize dinner party’s or just have dinner with friends. You have a great time and usually everyone makes a real effort to surprise their guests. Either with a present, by cooking an amazing meal or heaving great wine etc. Sometimes, we’ve talked about those amazing evenings for days to come. Such an event is worth to say thank you for in a more special way. A greeting card is needed. Thank you for Dinner!

During research, I stumbled across the slogan “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner”. I thought this to be a good match for my greeting card, as it was funny and showed a clear connection to food and dinner.

After drawing some thumbnails I noticed i wasn’t happy with it. The word “Chicken” gave it a very narrow reach. What if you didn’t have chicken for Dinner? It could feel strange to send a card about a specific food which wasn’t actually served. Even the retailer selling the cards could have issues, as everyone which doesn’t like chicken, vegetarians or anyone else actually could be put off by it. I’ve revised my initial idea and went back to visual research.

Dinner parties had their big time in the 50’s. The times of the modernist Art movement, Eames chairs and Type heavy Swiss Poster designs. This was my next inspiration and led me to the idea of creating a type only card, focused on bold fonts and color.

Some early inspiration from my mood board:

And my first thumbnail drawings. I liked the idea of giving a 3D effect to the individual letters. It gives them a structure makes the overall Design more “graphic” and elaborate.

Design

With my thumbnails, I’ve started placing the letters on a Greeting card template (Artboard) in Illustrator. The Letters were duplicated and connected to each other by drawing individual lines from and to each corner.

Grid

I made sure all letters were well placed and balanced. There is an invisible grid, giving each letter a limit. The letters are interconnected too. Each is either arranged by the middle or side of another.

Color

What color represent a Dinner? I consultant again my mood board and researched posters and designs related to food. Dinners are usually in the evening with warm lighting and, in the best case, soft background music. Therefore i didn’t want my design to show a very cold color palette. The 50s era should shine through the colors as well. I found myself with 6 different variations:

Final Front Design

And the winner is:

Because of the “pinkish” background, it has a soft and warm feeling. Exactly what i was searching to represent a dinner. The accent colors are bold and playful enough. And they’re not unappetising (its still about food at the end).

The Inside

I kept it simple again on the inside. I’ve copied the lines from the front to build a connection between both Sides. Adding “It was___” gives it a playful touch again and allows the sender to write a personal message on how exactly it was (exciting, delicious, new, different, bad?). The underlined part connect yet again to the lines in the background and the ones at front.